I see a new niche market here for "occasional glance" cable TV, one that would require less than 10% of the bandwidth that digital HD channels do now, thus allowing the inherent unreliability of Tuning Adapters to be dispensed with. A HD Video snapshot would be transmitted perhaps once every several seconds. (A more advanced version would sense when the viewer's eyeballs were aimed at the TV screen and provide on-demand snapshots.)

Carrying the concept even further would lead to "audio only" TV. Oh... I guess that was invented about 100 years ago. Actually, back in the days of TV being only channels 2-13 OTA I had an audio only TV set, err.. radio.

Please consider the above ideas with all the gravity that should pertain to this august thread.

Some people might like to sit down and watch the Daily Show or the Colbert Report, so I don't think that would work very well. Same for the MSNBC talk shows, although I highly doubt that a majority of the people consuming them are actually sitting there watching and doing nothing else.

Quote:

Originally Posted by timckelley

My wife hasn't had time yet to read my user doc on pyTiVo, but today I did use some advice given to me by the author himself to set her up so that she can use her laptop to access pyTiVo.

I kind of worry that once she eventually loses her dependence on my assistance to get her shows moved, that she might start going to town archiving shows. I want our NAS to last a good while before filling up, as I shelled out $500 for it.

To be fair, I've wanted an NAS for other reasons, but one is enough in my book.

Btw yesterday, I attached our laser printer to the NAS, effectively making it a network printer. That was nice.

Well, then you'd have an excuse to build a giant FreeNAS box with no spousal repercussions!

I see a concept here, for a new thread even "better" than this one, titled:

"Housekeeper won't delete recordings".

It would be an extremely short discussion, I fear. She's afraid to even dust the video systems, let alone learn how to use them. Lord knows why, really. It's not like they are inordinately frail, or that I would yell at her if she accidentally broke something, but while the rest of the house is kept clean and dust free, in order to get her to clean the video stacks, I have to pull out every component and have her dust it while I hold it. Weird.

Why not move the shows to a local PC hard drive? I just checked, and TiVo transfer sees the series 2 just fine. I happened to have a Mac house, but there's PC software to do this. Then she just transfers back to watch. Transfer over wired connection is a bit faster than real time.

This is the cheapest solution with no expense.
Second TiVo is the second choice.
A new wife may be better short term, but in the long run may be more expensive.

Disclosure, I have a wife and daughter, each with their own assigned 2 tuners.

and decide in which forum it would be best for your question to be posted, then click on that forum's title, then when it loads click on where it says "New Thread" (blue thing, on the left, just above the black bar)

I must have confused you with another poster. My prices were correct, however, I looked them up on Newegg based off of 3TB WD drives running in RAID 6, IIRC.

Then it is your math that is a little off. NewEgg has a 3T WD Green drive right now for $140. A 99T RAID0 array would require 33 spindles, costing $4620. A RAID6 array with 2 parity drives would run $4900. Wit that many drives, one might consider going with 5 parity drives, which would run $5320. A 20 drive enclosure with a drive controller can be had for about $1200. So even with 5 parity drives, one can put together a 99T array for under $7800 at today's pricing using 3T drives. A 99T RAID0 array can be had for just a bit over $7000 in drive costs.

Not only that, but just in the last few days, 4T drive prices have come down considerably. NewEgg now has a 4T drive for $190 with free shipping. That means a 100T RAID0 array will cost about $7150, or RAID6 with 4 parity drives, about $7900. That's not pennies, but it is still well below your $10K estimate.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

That's getting close to 20 years with enterprise grade hardware, not 30 with consumer grade hardware.

I can count, thanks. The point is, they have lasted 20 years, and only a couple have failed so far. There is no reason to believe most will not last another 10 years, assuming they are still in use.

I do not know for certain whether they are enterprise grade, or not. I suspect they are, but on the other hand, in that application they do not need to be fast or to deliver high throughput, or even need to be particularly robust. They certainly were not fast or of huge capacity for the time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

Then go somewhere else. There are tons of options for streaming, and even then, you can't possible watch it all.

You are missing the point entirely. Again, it is not about the volume of the material, it is about its quality and its ease of access. Some nebulous "somewhere else" does not cut the mustard. Please point to an exact source for those two movies available online in a minimum of 1080i resolution with no objectionable artifacts. Then tell me how long it took you to find them WITHOUT KNOWING THE TITLES BEFOREHAND. We did not sit down and say, "Let's watch Finian's Rainbow and Little Man Tate tonight. Rather, we browsed the list of movies on the server and chose those two.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

The concept of re-watching content in this day and age doesn't make any sense either, there's so much new content out there all the time that there's no reason to re-watch most things

That is only true if one is a highly superficial individual, unwilling to derive any meaningful understanding or fulfillment from works of art. It is doubly untrue because the vast majority of content out there is total crap, and not worth watching the first time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

other than a few legendary movies, which are easily available everywhere.

Well, let's see...

'Directed by Francis Ford Copola. Well, few people have ever heard of him, I guess, so nothing of legend there.

'Starring some guy named Fred Astaire. Was he in any other films? Oh, yeah, one or two. It seems this was his last one. Nothing of note there, is there? Maybe if they had done some research, they might have found someone who could dance for this film, though.

That Petula Clark girl needs to learn how to sing, and that Don Franks guy has such a grating voice. Tommy Steele needs to learn how to move onstage.

Yeah, I guess you are right. 'Nothing legendary about that film.[/sarcasm]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

There is no realistic usage case for even a few TB of TV shows, thus it is hoarding.

You simply have no clue whatsoever. My time is highly limited, but even so my family and I have watched at least 200G of content from the server just this month. More importantly, you continue to ignore the main points. Do you go out in the wild and gather all your food? I seriously doubt it. I'm sure like almost everyone else, you go to to a grocery store or supermarket and buy your food all in one place. The fact the supermarket has tens of thousands of times more food than you can ever eat in a lifetime is completely beside the point. You choose a supermarket because of its convenience, its variety of goods, and perhaps its cost. An array of videos offers precisely the same advantages.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

I'm talking about current political and social events that are important.

Social events are never important in even the tiniest measure. Current political events are only rarely so, and even then there are almost none on which you can have any effect at all, unless you do happen to be in that 1%. One's knowledge or lack thereof has no effect whatsoever on it. What's more, it is almost impossible to determine which events are of actual import until there is a historical content. The actual importance of an event is usually impossible to properly gauge until years or even decades afterwards. We are still learning some details of the actual impact and significance of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, not to mention some of its details.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

I like to stay educated on what's going on in the world.

Do you really? China is by far the most populous nation on Earth. More than 1.4 billion people are Chinese, which is nearly 20% of the Earth's population. Please give us a brief synopsis of the top 100 most significant political events in China this year, and then tell us what you are going to do about them.

The European union has a significantly higher GDP than the United States. Please provide the same information concerning its economic activities.

I see you live in Hartford, Connecticut. "The world", however, certainly includes the other 49 states. Please provide the 20 most significant legal decisions in each of the other 49 states in the last three months.

Then realize that once you have gathered all that information, you have not garnered even .000001% of "important" events in the last three months.

News stories are not designed to be informative. They are designed to be popular and sensational. The overarching goal of news agencies is not to educate anyone. It is to make money. Admittedly, some are worse about this than others. There is a genuine difference between E! and The Macneil Lehrer Report or between "The National Enquirer" and "The Wall Street Journal", but none of them can possibly do more than scratch the very top surface of world events and they can only take a superficial WAG about the actual importance of anything they report.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

The state of the US economy and political system of course impacts everyone.

Not so much, really. First of all, the US population only constitutes about 4.5% of the world's total population, and the actual deterministic impact to the other 95.5% of the world is minimal at best. Secondly, even the impact to Americans of the top million or so events is minimal. It is the culmination of billions of events that has an impact. Thirdly, I do not consider economic events of any sort to be particularly important. I have spent considerable parts of my life living in mild poverty and considerable parts of my life being what some would term moderately wealthy. Neither is of importance to me or to who I am. Provided I am not in danger of starving to death or dieing of exposure, how much money I have is not important. It's all small change.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

However, if you go by a strict definition of only things that directly impact you

I don't believe I ever used the term, "directly impact me". I did say, "Which I can directly impact", which is a VERY different thing. I focus most of my energy on the things I can directly control, or at least directly influence.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

you will quickly become an ignorant person with no intellectual curiosity.

It is to laugh. In 54 years, no one and I mean NO ONE has ever accused me of being incurious or ignorant. A few have accused me of being overly curious and a number have accused me of being tiresomely over-educated.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

That's a horrible, pathetic existence.

Typical of people who seek only superficial information and current events and artwork.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

People who have intelligence

Few professional engineers and scientists are lacking in intelligence. You were addressing me in your original post, and I certainly do not qualify. That may sound arrogant, but it is an established fact.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

and intelectual curiosity will read and learn about things that they won't do or see or places they won't go, but still gain from the experience.

Well, I prefer to go and do, and as much as possible, I have. Places I can never go and things I can never do, of course I must read about, or at least study from afar, and I do. I generally limit it to important things, however, not current events.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

The world moves at a faster pace than that. I like to be able to have an intelligent conversation about things on a daily or weekly basis, not years later.

In that case, you have neither. You are substituting an UNintelligent conversation about frivolous events for an intelligent one about significant ones.

I don't intend to be abusive, but your entire discourse positively reeks of superficiality and foppishness. By your statements, you don't extract more than a minimum of information from movies and TV episodes because you only watch them once, and evidently you mostly watch superficial content. You seemingly favor that which is current, superficial, and sensational over that which is substantive. You seek out information that will never be of any use to you other than in conversation.

Conversations are fine. I have them quite often and enjoy them, but life is about doing, not talking.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

I'm sorry, but I'm not retarded. I can wash dishes, prepare food, or fold laundry while comprehending what is on my TV. So can most other people.

In fact no one can. Any distraction is just that: a distraction. To be sure, there are some activities that require minimal amounts of attention, but I avoid such things as much as possible in the first place. They may not exactly impoverish one's existence, but they certainly do not enrich it, and I most certainly am not going to dilute an edifying experience with unnecessary distractions, even if I could do so effectively. No matter what I choose to undertake, I give it my 100% undivided attention so that I may do the best possible job of it as quickly and effectively as I can.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

If you weren't, you wouldn't be able to really afford a housekeeper.

As I say, I don't really know or care. My relative economic standing is of absolutely no importance. That said, I think that more than 1 out of every 100 people have a housekeeper, at least part time. If I am wrong about that, however, who really cares?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

I don't really cook much

I do. Usually at least once a day, and often more on weekends.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

but I do a decent amount of food prep and cleaning and whatnot in the kitchen. However, I'm not an idiot, I can handle a knife just fine while listening to Jon Stewart or Rachel Maddow. If you have issues handling knives, then you shouldn't be handling them in the first place.

I never said you were an idiot, but anyone who handles a knife or any other dangerous device without giving it 100% of their absolutely undivided attention is indeed an idiot. I did so long prior to my paralysis, and now that I am somewhat crippled, I must be even more careful. I have seen many people injured by improper attention, and I have even seen a couple of people killed by it. (No, I have never seen anyone killed by accidentally mis-handling a knife, but I have certainly seen people cut themselves through inattention.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

There's more leeway than that.

Sometimes, but often not. Some of my favorite recipes can be ruined by a mis-timing of less than 30 seconds.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

Yes, it does require some planning. Which has nothing to do with also listening to/watching a show at the same time.

It's not entirely about planning. It is about paying attention and performing the proper actions at just the proper time during the process. There is a reason restaurants hire sous chefs and regular chefs, as well as an executive chef.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

So the radio, which everyone listens to while they drive

Not everyone does. I do not, except in rural highways. I really should not, even then.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

is a horrendous distraction?

Horrendous? No. Deadly? It can be. Any event of which your mind takes note requires processing that takes away from other processes. If you hear the words of a song, a podcast, or a conversation, then your mind is distracted to some extent - perhaps a large one in some cases - from its other duties. A 2008 study by Carnegie Mellon University confirms this, as well as other studies by the U.S DOT and the NTSB.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

Give me a break. That's absurd. I'm a better driver while I'm listening to a podcast, as my mind isn't wandering all over the place

What I might have to give you is a funeral. The average trip requires a driver to make over 400 decisions per mile. Even during the takeoff and landing phase of a flight on a commercial jetliner, let alone while cruising, a pilot is faced with fewer decisions than a driver of an automobile, yet FAA regulations require absolute silence in the cockpit other than sounds and conversations directly related to the flight from the time the flight checklist is started until the cabin is depressurized and the engines shut down.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

You're acting as if everything that comes out is off the market within months or a few years.

No, but a large fraction of what I want to watch is. Indeed, much of it was never on the market in the first place, for home consumption.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

That's absurd and completely untrue. The amount of consumer choice has never been higher

Again, the volume is not of high relevance, other than the fact the volume of crap through which one must wade to find something worth watching is enormous.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

and you can find a massive selection of content available on demand between your MSO, iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, VUDU, and the like.

All of it requiring additional money and a great deal of time and effort. 'Vert tiresome time and effort.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

More than anyone can watch.

Once again you focus on the truly trite, superficial, and trivial. Just because it is a mountain of garbage, rather than a mole hill, does not make it better.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bigg

If you really need to find something obscure late, someone probably has it on Amazon or Ebay for sale.

So buying it and putting it on a shelf is not hoarding (and yes, I have a few hundred DVDs on the shelf), but obtaining it much less expensively and putting it on a server is?

I stand behind my math. Maybe you can find something a few bucks cheaper, or skimp on something, but the point is, it costs a lot of money.

Expecting consumer grade hardware to last that long is completely nuts. I'm not saying that none of it will, but it's an unrealistic expectation.

If you're just browsing, you've defeated even what really specific use-case you might have had. If you're just browsing, there are tons of cloud-based services out there you can browse.

Wanting to experience new things doesn't make one superficial.

Huh?

Highly time limited and watching 200GB of content don't make any sense together.

If you want to use stupid analogies that don't work then I have to ask why you are demanding to have your own supermarket in your basement?

That's a great attitude- you are only one of many votes, so you should just be ignorant. Thank god not everyone is that uncaring and ignorant, as the government would be even worse than it is today, taking more and more power unto themselves, like in defense, DHS, CIA, etc, with no one to try to counterbalance.

What? Somehow I have to now be an encyclopedia with photographic memory? You are unbelievably hypocritical and totally unrealistic.

It depends on the news show. Some are sensationalist, others are highly informative, i.e. Rachel Maddow's show that looks at things from a technocratic perspective, and digs up many obscure facts and stories that are important.

And this is why we should all be ignorant why?

That's going to get you to just as much of a narrow, ignorant place as the other way around.

Your attitude here shows you to be highly incurious and ignorant.

If you can't gain something from learning about a place you won't ever travel to, for example, then you are highly ignorant and narrow-minded.

Superficiality and foppishness? You've got to be kidding me. You sound like you're trying to do a poor job at imitating a snobbish intellectual, but you're so ignorant, that you can't pull it off. You seem very selfish in a weird way that cuts you off from a lot of interesting things.

I stand by the fact that I'm not retarded, and I can listen to a talk show and prepare food at the same time.

You've got to be kidding me. You're advocating that no one listen to anything while driving? This is absurd un-logic.

Cloud-based is the easier way to enjoy content. You rent or watch, and you're done. Nothing to store, organize, or maintain.

If you go by the argument that everything out there is garbage, then it's all garbage. You can't, then, argue that you need 10TB or 100TB or garbage, because it's garbage. If you think TV is garbage, then don't watch it, and read a book or something.

Having a reasonable sized collection of physical media is not hoarding. Just like anything else, an excess is. And the whole media server model doesn't work well for converting physical media, as it takes many times more effort to convert it than you will ever gain out of the system.

But anyone who handles a knife or any other dangerous device without giving it 100% of their absolutely undivided attention is indeed an idiot.

Sometimes there's a gem buried in a thread that goes on a while. Sorry, off-topic, but I am the cook in my house. And when I have the knife in my hand, I concentrate. When the wife or daughter try to talk to me I stop, and tell them this is the time I can't multitask.
Thank you for confirming my need for 100% concentration isn't just normal, but a safe recommendation.

IIRC my NAS, including its 6 TB, cost somewhere around $400 [later post I corrected this to $500], and I would hope it lasts considerably longer than 5 years.

Oh no! I think I installed this NAS a little over 8 months ago, and Windows is reporting that out of a total capacity of 3 TB (it's really 6, but I'm using a 2 disk RAID for redundant data storage, so for practical purposes it's 3), 46.8% is used up!

At this rate, it will last a total of just under 1.5 years before it gets tapped out, contradicting my post above.

My wife's shows seem to be growing like a cancer.

I suppose if necessary, I could buy another NAS, and chalk up my wife's habit as costing $500 every 1.5 years. I suppose there are worse habits.

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Oh no! I think I installed this NAS a little over 8 months ago, and Windows is reporting that out of a total capacity of 3 TB (it's really 6, but I'm using a 2 disk RAID for redundant data storage, so for practical purposes it's 3), 46.8% is used up!

At this rate, it will last a total of just under 1.5 years before it gets tapped out, contradicting my post above.

My wife's shows seem to be growing like a cancer.

I suppose if necessary, I could buy another NAS, and chalk up my wife's habit as costing $500 every 1.5 years. I suppose there are worse habits.

There are definitely more expensive habits, that's for sure. As hobbies go, you're getting off pretty cheap.

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Well when I brought this up with her tonight, she did say that at some point, she can look into deleting some archived stuff that she doesn't really need that much. So it sounds like she's subtly admitting she doesn't really need all the shows she's saving.

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Well when I brought this up with her tonight, she did say that at some point, she can look into deleting some archived stuff that she doesn't really need that much. So it sounds like she's subtly admitting she doesn't really need all the shows she's saving.

Well when I brought this up with her tonight, she did say that at some point, she can look into deleting some archived stuff that she doesn't really need that much. So it sounds like she's subtly admitting she doesn't really need all the shows she's saving.

One of the ways I save on hard disk space is to buy the commercial DVDs for TV shows when one is available. It just doesn't make sense to me to spend a lot of time transferring a show, cutting out the commercials, and burning stuff to a disc, or having the file sit around on my hard disk, when I could just buy DVD, especially for the season sets of TV shows.

Or in other words, if I don't care enough about a show to buy the DVD, there's not much point in archiving it with the TiVo instead. (I also delete far more of the shows I record than I did when I was using a VCR to record things when I was away from home.)

Most of the shows I save rather than delete are things which will never have a commercial DVD.

YMMV.

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One of the ways I save on hard disk space is to buy the commercial DVDs for TV shows when one is available. It just doesn't make sense to me to spend a lot of time transferring a show, cutting out the commercials, and burning stuff to a disc, or having the file sit around on my hard disk, when I could just buy DVD, especially for the season sets of TV shows.

Or in other words, if I don't care enough about a show to buy the DVD, there's not much point in archiving it with the TiVo instead. (I also delete far more of the shows I record than I did when I was using a VCR to record things when I was away from home.)

Most of the shows I save rather than delete are things which will never have a commercial DVD.

YMMV.

Tim and/or his wife might also want to just consider using Amazon or Vudu or somewhere similar to buy the series in the cloud. No need to store it on your own media, no need to store it on physical media and simple enough to access it all when necessary.

Tim and/or his wife might also want to just consider using Amazon or Vudu or somewhere similar to buy the series in the cloud. No need to store it on your own media, no need to store it on physical media and simple enough to access it all when necessary.

That's another option.

If resources are limited, do triage. Save the stuff locally that won't be available by other means.

I especially don't see the point in archiving runs of older TV series off broadcast once they have been cut down in length for syndication. If the DVDs have the original running time, IMO it's much better to have the DVDs.

__________________
"The capacity of human beings to disappoint me is never ending." -- Ereth

Well, reviewing our NAS, I now find that it's 70% used up. Compared to my last update on this, it looks like my wife has slightly accelerated her usage of the NAS. (I'm also putting files - nonvideo related - of my own on the NAS, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the files that she's putting there.)

She furthermore has told me that with Christmas season approaching, she thinks she's going to record even more stuff soon, causing an even higher rate of disk usage. She seems to be spending our bytes like the federal government spends our dollars.

Her recommendation is that I already should start shopping for a second NAS, and that I can consider it my Christmas present to her. By the way, we often tell each other what to give for Christmas, so this is fine that she's letting me know what she wants. But it'd've been nice for a $500 piece of storage to last longer than this.

I also keep bringing up the idea of ax-ing Time Warner Cable because of how little I think we get for the money. She keeps waffling on this, and is not close minded, but one thing that bugs her is that if we start getting content from a combination of OTA + Hulu Plus + possibly Netflix or renting from Amazon + miscellaneous other web sources, that it might not be so easy for her to archive stuff.

I told her that, for example, if she likes a show on Hulu Plus but can't archive it (I assume they don't let you do that), that it's okay because she can consider Hulu Plus to be her gigantic archive. Everything's available on demand, so there's no need for a personally stored copy of any of their shows. She still doesn't seem 100% comfortable with that. I guess she might worry whether a show that she'd've otherwise archived in say, 2014, will still be available in 2034 when she might want to watch it again. Who knows what will happen to Hulu Plus by then.

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I guess she might worry whether a show that she'd've otherwise archived in say, 2014, will still be available in 2034 when she might want to watch it again. Who knows what will happen to Hulu Plus by then.

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I'm sure this has been covered but it's been a long time since I have read the thread so... Have you figured out how many hours of TV she has archived and how many days or years it would to take to watch?

I'm sure this has been covered but it's been a long time since I have read the thread so... Have you figured out how many hours of TV she has archived and how many days or years it would to take to watch?

No, I never did that calculation, but I could make a rough guess if something there could tell me how many bytes it takes to record an hour worth. Most of her stuff is recorded at fairly low quality, so she probably gets a lot of hours stuffed in a smaller amount of space. I'd like to think she doesn't pick the lowest quality setting, but maybe the second lowest.

I do remember a few years ago her having a VHS collection of something like several hundred cassettes, but when we moved I think she disposed of a lot of those. My son actually still sometimes watches things on VHS, though DVD is more common in our house. But it's kind of amusing to me that people still like VHS.

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No, I never did that calculation, but I could make a rough guess if something there could tell me how many bytes it takes to record an hour worth. Most of her stuff is recorded at fairly low quality, so she probably gets a lot of hours stuffed in a smaller amount of space. I'd like to think she doesn't pick the lowest quality setting, but maybe the second lowest.

I do remember a few years ago her having a VHS collection of something like several hundred cassettes, but when we moved I think she disposed of a lot of those. My son actually still sometimes watches things on VHS, though DVD is more common in our house. But it's kind of amusing to me that people still like VHS.

Quality? HUH? TiVos don't have that anymore, as they record whatever comes off the cable. So it's either SD or HD, depending on what channel you use.